MG Car Brand to Be Rolling in US Again

CARDIFF, Wales, Feb. 7 -- Not since the 1960s, when British sports cars were a staple of American roads, has the once extremely popular MG auto brand been available to domestic auto enthusiasts. According to a story in Primedia's Automobile magazine's March issue, that is likely to change -- soon.

Jamie Kitman, the New York bureau chief of Automobile recently traveled to Cardiff, home of MG Rover Group, the British parent company, and sat down for a substantive discussion with the company's top executives. The new management is aware of the tradition the company has in the U.S. ``Here in America, the MG name is still associated with the traditional English accoutrements, leather and wood, even if wood was never a visible part of the MG formula,'' Kitman writes.

Until recently, MG was owned by the German-based BMW, which had trouble marketing the venerable British brand, eventually selling it back to British owners the Phoenix consortium, a group of investor/managers led by former Rover head John Tower. Some speculate that BMW had been reluctant to market MGs in America, ``a fear within BMW that a truly revitalized MG might cut into sales of home-brewed money spinners, such as the Z3,'' Kitman writes.

The Phoenix group has no such qualms, he concludes, and, ``Unless things go badly wrong, MG will return to America soon,'' with such sporty models as the MG ZR160 (about $21,000), a super-fast hatchback with a 160 hp, 16-valve four cylinder engine; the ZS 180 ($25,000), reminiscent of an English Acura RSX; and the ZT190 (about $30,000), which can go from 0 to 60 in 7.8 seconds, a four-door with a difference. Top of the line is the ZT XPower 500 (about $45,000), a sporty V-8 that could fill a major gap in the American market.

The new MG Rover management told Kitman that it would make a profit if it sold 200,000 cars a year, a stark contrast with standard thinking in the auto industry that sales have to be in the millions to insure a profitable enterprise. And increasingly, Automobile reports, it looks like some of those cars will be sold stateside. We can hardly wait.